The management domain in your environment must be upgraded before you upgrade VI workload domains. To upgrade to VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2, all VI workload domains in your environment must be at VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5 or higher. If your environment is at a version lower than 4.5, you must upgrade the workload domains to 4.5 and then upgrade to 5.2.

Within a VI workload domain, components must be upgraded in the following order.
  1. NSX.
  2. vCenter Server.
  3. ESXi.
  4. Workload Management on clusters that have vSphere with Tanzu. Workload Management can be upgraded through vCenter Server. See Updating the vSphere with Tanzu Environment.
  5. If you suppressed the Enter Maintenance Mode prechecks for ESXi or NSX, delete the following lines from the /opt/vmware/vcf/lcm/lcm-app/conf/application-prod.properties file and restart the LCM service:

    lcm.nsxt.suppress.dry.run.emm.check=true

    lcm.esx.suppress.dry.run.emm.check.failures=true

  6. If you have stretched clusters in your environment, upgrade the vSAN witness host. See Upgrade vSAN Witness Host for VMware Cloud Foundation.
After all upgrades have completed successfully:
  1. Remove the VM snapshots you took before starting the update.
  2. Take a backup of the newly installed components.